This disclosure relates generally to electronic communications, and more particularly to video chat and generating composite images based on video chat sessions.
Video chat has become commonplace. Users use clients such as mobile phones, tablets, and computers to participate in video chat sessions with one or more other participants. A video chat allows the participants to exchange both audio and video in real time. The participants' clients display the video and play the accompanying audio, allowing the participants to both see and hear each other.
A chat participant may wish to take a picture of the displayed video chat. That is, the participant may wish to capture a snapshot image of the video chat as it is displayed on the participant's client at a given moment in time. The picture serves to memorialize the gathering and can be shared on social media or used for other purposes. One way to generate a picture is to use functionality built into the client to capture an image of the current content displayed by the device. For example, the participant can press a button or button combination on the client to save the current display to an image file stored on the device.
However, images captured in this manner tend to be of poor quality. The video streams received from the remote chat participants often undergo compression and other processing. In addition, the streams may suffer network transmission errors. These streams appear to have high quality when viewed as a video. But the streams have noticeable artifacts that detract from the quality when viewed as still images. For example, the images of the other chat participants may appear blocky or blurred. These quality defects detract from the participants' video chat experience.